"Comrade Krylenko concerns himself only incidentally with the affairs of his commissariat. But to direct the Commissariat of Justice, great initiative and a serious attitude toward oneself is required. Whereas Comrade Krylenko used to spend a great deal of time on mountain-climbing and traveling, now he devotes a great deal of time to playing chess... We need to know what we are dealing with in the case of Comrade Krylenko—the commissar of justice? or a mountain climber? I dont know which Comrade Krylenko thinks of himself as, but he is without doubt a poor peoples commissar."
Nikolai Vasilyevich Krylenko was an Old Bolshevik and Soviet politician, military commander, and jurist. Krylenko served in a variety of posts in the Soviet legal system, rising to become People's Commissar for Justice and Prosecutor General of the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic. He was executed during the Great Purge.
"So who are the bulk of our clients in these sorts of cases? Is it the working class? No! Its classless hoodlums. Classless hoodlums, either from the dregs of the society, or from the remains of the exploiters class. They have no place to go. So they take to -- pederasty. Together with them, next to them, under this excuse, in stinky secretive bordellos another kind of activity takes place as well -- counter-revolutionary work."
"In the absence of a criminal code, a court might give a reprimand for a punch in the nose in Ryazan, while the sentence in Tula might be shooting."
"The basic mistake in eyery case is made by those women who consider freedom of abortion as one of their civil rights. We need new fighters - they built this life, we need people."
"We will secure peace, over the corpses of the counterrevolutionary command staff if necessary."
"An epileptic degenerate . . . and the most repulsive type I came across in all my connections with the Bolsheviks."
"Krylenko is brave and fearless. He is one of the typical Russians of whom the great psychologist Dostoyevsky said: "it is not he that created the idea, but the idea that created him."